Going to revamp Flight 2000 in the near future by rewriting its software - popular opinion already stands that relocking balls during multiball to no avail is no fun.

Open to suggestions as to anything else that would be nice to add to the game. I suspect already people will request the popular spinner counters

re: Lane change

Almost always someone makes it a point to ask for Lane Change whenever I ask about adding/changing rules.... here are my thoughts on lane change:

If the game ruleset is designed around it, yes, by all means it makes sense. In the case of F2k, it would make it way too easy to complete BLAST OFF. Unless something were added like it resets the letter if it wasn't already lit, penalizing you if you weren't paying attention. Spotting the letter like the older romset mod did also made it a bit easy, but I agree that something should be done to spot letters.

For multiplied scoring I plan on indicating that using the displays. On Firepower7 I blit the multiplier with the ball in play display and would probably do something similar on flight, or use the other player displays like WMS did (although that will depend on how much free space I can wrangle).

For Multiball, it's going to go something like this: You start multiball, it sets a flag. The only thing that clears that multiball flag is all the balls draining in the drain, not relocked etc. The flag will remain set, and the walker and ball maze will be controlled by that flag.

I like the idea of the timed drops resetting.

How about the idea for the bonus ladder being like quicksilvers where your bonus is 10k+9k+8k, etc. but the bonus doesn't just build a step at a time, it builds depending on the letters BLASTOFF (so there's 8 ) and then 2 additional shots from something else (ball locks?) to get you up to 10k? That's a potential 55k in bonus times your multiplier. (825k with 15x). By necessity, the bonus would have to carry over from ball to ball.... but reset the multiplier so it doesn't become a runaway for the first person to ramp up their bonus.

How about a lane change that the player doesn't control? I.e. moves around with pop, spinner, or slingshot hits? That way, if there's some shot that's eluding you, you have some kind of chance. That sounds like something that could be turned on and off with a dip switch.

Progress so far I have the original game codebase compiling, and am searching for ways to crunch down its footprint. This will definitely be a challenge as the space saving techniques previously used on Meteor and 9 ball are not saving space here since most of the code is pretty optimized already. I suppose I could toss everything out except the OS and really rewrite the entire thing, but I don't want to change the gameplay that much.

I probably will have to make some decisions on options instead to cut since those decision trees do take up a lot of space... maybe I can combine some of those.

A lot of the suggestions so far won't take up too much space but the stock space available is less than 10 bytes, so something will have to go!

One of the tempting things everytime I start one of these projects is to dump out the startup sequence - it's relatively long, and homeowners certainly keep track of if their games work correctly or not so might not need the LED flash startup. You can always put another chip in if needed to diagnose MPU board issues. I tried meteor once without any tests for an 'instant on' experience like WMS games and I hated it! I suppose it's just something you'd have to get used to.

Maybe I'll take a run at rewriting all the diagnostics instead, they're a little convoluted too, because of the 'burn in' test aspect where everything is cycling - there's some savings there.

I'm sure not everyone would want to either mod their mpu200's to take a larger chip or use a weebly that would want to use this software so now my work's cut out for me.

Oh, and the other thing that's going to get added is a proper knocker, in place of the coin lockout that no one ever uses in home use (and stern themselves abandoned a couple games later).

Yeah, I thought about making the stock stuff just for the weebly board. Audits don't really take up a lot space other than occupying ram, the routines are short. Coin logic would save some.

Let's see what I can do re: crunching first, I might be able to get what I need I don't think I'll need too much for the suggestions. At least there's 3-4 open timers available for the timed functions.

It should if you modify it with the info from my page:
https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/romblaster

The seigecraft adapter plugs into the cpu socket so should intercept anything in the rom address range, but I'm not sure if the custom address decoder on the Alltek would interfere (it shouldn't).

I use Minipro TL866CS, apparently discontinued and the replacement II version doesn't go up to 21v for programming older 2732 type chips. However, if you have a weebly board for this purpose, the extra socket is a 512 and either the 866cs or 866II would work if you got those chips. I just ordered 30 of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JVJCZYG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00
Based on Andrew's recommendation, as you would be able to skip buying a UV eraser since these are the eletronically eraseable version of the 512. I haven't received them yet but I'm sure they will be fine.

If you get the mini pro, it forces you to do an upgrade on the firmware when you first start it up - it will seemingly be frozen, DON'T UNPLUG IT. Let it sit for 5 minutes or so, then restart and it will be fine. Here is a review of the minipro which tilted me towards picking it up:

Well, part of the reason I even do this type of mod is the challenge of getting it to fit in the original space. Getting people to install rom mods is actually pretty difficult for some reason, and any bar to entry like having to buy a new board would make that even more difficult. I treat it like the demoscene for old computers, trying to wring the most performance and efficiency as I can out of it. For instance, in the 9ball project, I've saved more than enough room to implement the newer style Oliver ruleset in the stock romspace, just by more efficiently re-writing some routines. The savings available in Flight are minimal since the programmer used more efficient coding to begin with, but I still have some tricks up my sleeve to implement. Best of all, I don't have to depend on beta testers for this game like 9 ball since I own an f2k.

The Alltek image has space in it to add romsets the format isn't that hard to figure out there's a spreadsheet floating around that listed out what's in there and you can tell from the pattern of dips where each will end up. The issue is that Alltek apparently will not honor their lifetime warranty if you modify the board in anyway (fair enough). I don't think he's against putting custom romsets, etc. in his product, since there are some there already, I just think he wants his ship to steer the way it's going, kind of automatically, and he can just collect the $$$ from the product. That's fine if that's his model, but eventually it's going to be chipped away and he'll have to change or leave. If you ask even avid hobbyists "what replacement board would you recommend" I'd say almost 80% of them would just say Alltek, even though Andrew/weebly's has the same boards available, cheaper. Funny how in the Williams Areans, Rottendog gets all the business, being the cheapest, but in the Bally/Stern world, it's all Alltek (probably because he was first to market with an all in one).

You burn a new eprom for the game with the new code, which Coyote will be setting up a website to host. AFAIK Rottendog boards for Williams don't even use the STOCK williams software, there's a slight mod to it for some reason. I never looked into it, every project I've bought with a RD in it I sell the board since my purpose is to do the modifications and that board is useless to me. See the other answer above for the Alltek issues.

I am slowly converting all my games over to the weebly board just for the convenience of the 512 socket. So far, there are 2 games that will use the expanded ram/rom capabilities of it, Stars rewritten with a mashup of sternmpu200 and wms pinbol style coding, and Black Hole with the same OS (that's a major long term work in progress as you can imagine.... a bally board in a gottlieb machine).

All of the game suggestions in this thread would be child's play to stick in the weebly as it sits but that encourages sloppy programming practices. By tightening up code on Meteor for instance I saved almost 1/4 of the stock romspace for the mods, and 9 ball so far I've saved about 200 bytes (which is coming from a full rom, so 200 bytes is very significant).

When Dave at Alltek went to surface mount I beta tested one of his boards for him in all the stern mpu200 games since I had all but 2 of them at the time. He indicated that the rom was getting full, so didn't have space for all the stern free play roms and he was going to release a special edition of the board with just stern stuff on it. I tried to talk him out of that (I think successfully since it never came out) as it would just sow confusion... which alltek is in there? I gave him a suggestion on how to implement freeplay on all games and also how to save space in his eprom but thus far neither have been implemented. I really think he just wants the project to run on automatic. I think he's making a pretty penny with it as it is since he is the top of mind replacement board.

I liken it to the older tried and true people buy Allteks, and the 'cool kids' buy the Weebly boards.

I think the lane change option is going to end up being spinner/pop hits change the lit lanes. There's no switches available to add lane change anywhere else, and player controlled lane change would make the game dead nuts easy.

I also think maybe an occasional one shot spot on the center standup would be nice - maybe have a blinking lane travel around the playfield on your unlit lanes, and hitting the center drop spots that lane only.

I think multiball should be attainable in about 30-40% of games, not 100% of games. Even with the spot a letter in the current version of the software I have, it's still a bit easy to get it, but not 100%.... probably about 80%. I didn't really track it though.

Yes, the meteor code's free play option is just that... an option. All the original coin acceptance is still there as stock. (Minus a bug in the original software that sometimes puts a 1 in the hstd's 1's unit!).

It is 99 max credits though, so if you need a variant on that (i.e. lower) you'd have to contact me for a custom-custom rom image.

I don't plan on excising the coin handling code in anything if I can avoid it. I'll have to see how much space all the suggestions take up once I start coding the enhancements. Honestly assembly langugage and stern's bytecode pigs language are really efficient.... the things that take up space in these roms are the light shows, the sounds, and parts of the OS. The actual game code for each switch is a couple bytes. The entire coin handling is less than 100 bytes, no need to excise it unless I get really desperate. I'd take out the startup flash test first.

That would be nice to have new speech for the old stern games, and conveniently enough, although the speech rom u9 is full up, later stern speech games have u10 populated as well. I can poke around in there and see what I can find, hopefully it's like Gottlieb games and the speech phonemes are just kind of laid out in a row. The speech chip isn't a microprocessor as far as I know but I haven't really looked into that aspect too much. (I started to try and figure out how the sb-300 creates sounds, but I'm not far along into that at all other than identifying that it's programming the 6840 timer to run through a D/A convertor in the form of a resistor ladder to create sounds).

Update so far in making space in the roms, I've gained back about 90 bytes with no change in functionality, and added the lane change function to the slings, spinners, and pops. Waiting on the eeproms to arrive to stick it in the machine and make sure nothing blows up. I think the lane change will be interesting because as I was writing it, I realized you have to change what's currently lit in the blast off lane as well or it becomes meaningless.

I think I'll go with the bonus being built up to 19k instead of the other schemes like quicksilver because you're shooting all around the playfield anything on f2k to get the letters. I like the idea of the quick shot left lane to right spinner advancing the spinner as well, and I think stuff like a double spinner and bonus X advance for sweeping the right bank is a good idea too.

Of course, 2x, 3x or 4x (4x is usually easier to code than a 3x mode) during multiball was always in the cards. Identifying the progression of the multiball flags is proceeding but it's not intuitive so I want to make sure I have it 100% correct first.

It says 1.2.3.4.5, prepare mission, stand in test mode.

So, Stand? Either way, there's an entire 2k available to add stuff.

The real issue to solve remains that the game roms are just full. I'm not at the point yet where I'm going to excise things like startup test, etc. but I think at some point that's going to happen, or the rom will be weebly only (really rather not limit this if I can, though.)

A while ago I tried some bally/stern game as an 'instant on' type of thing and it was so weird that I put it back to stock. But we'll see!

Williams games I think were instant on because the Green OS rom is FULL. They did all sorts of tricks to even get it working the way it is and get it to fit in 4k.

I do have some of the speech data decoded, and can move words around.... there's also commands to change the timbre/tone/frequency of the voices, so that can add some variations.

The lane change code broke the game so I'll have to fix that, but the 19k bonus ladder adds up correctly and collects correctly.... a lot less sloppy than the effort from 8 or 9 years ago (and in the stock rom footprint).

Oh, I changed the way the 19k counts down too, in the "old" version with this it got very odd sounds, so what it's going to do is count down the 10k chunks first (so 15x10, 10k bonus lamp flashes while it's adding that in, then it extinguishes the 10k lamp and counts down the rest of the bonus normally.). Kind of like how Bally games did it for the super bonus. This way the sound effects won't get messed up.

Still debugging the lane change. The stern pigs command to branch to a subroutine that's in assembly is .... strange.... in its behavior. It works 100% flawlessly for some things, but some stuff it just breaks itself. In the case of the current subroutine it breaks the score queue timing, even when it's not running. I suspect that I might have something that doesn't relocate properly, although that would really only be the sound data at this point... unless there's a couple more hardcoded tricky things lurking in the code! Found another one yesterday, it was rather clever the way it was done to dummy up a new return address for a bunch of sound routines. Stern should have let Pfutz modify the original pigs code but I think that just got plugged in as a module. There's a lot of improvements (well, space saving) to be made there.

example-
Every Stern game has these 3 lines in it:

lda $0038 ;currently up player
ldb #$6F ;$280 (start of player save area)-$11
lda $0038 ;currently up player

So they load the accumulator from $38 twice..... in the same routine. You'd think someone would have audited it way back when.

There's also artifacts of probably debugging going on, odd NOP's inserted, a mix of assembler directives that mix 3 byte operands with 2 byte when a 2 byte would have sufficed. I remember assemblers back in the 80s on home computer and most were shit. The really "good" ones were hundreds of dollars. The worst was the Atari 800 Assembler-editor cartridge. Hand assembling was almost faster

Since the 6502 was designed as a 6800 killer, that's probably why.... Chuck Peddle worked at Motorola and left with his team because he wanted to design and sell $25 cpu's. Motorola at the time was getting $200 or so for the 6800. It actually interesting that Bally and Williams even went with the 6800 instead of the 6502, but I've no idea what the quantity discount pricing would have netted them.

Both processors certainly have their shortcomings, the 6803 addresses some of them, and the 6809 is the best of them all in the 8 bit arena. At this point I prefer the 68xx branch to the 6502 for most things, my complaints usually boil down to minutia about the index register limitations in both. Too bad you can't pop a 6809 into the 6800 socket and adapt code away

Testing will be needed at some point. I plan on releasing all the source code once it's in shape to do so and people can certainly add any rules I choose not to implement. Over the next couple days I plan on putting in the timed left inlane to right spinner combo, debugging the automatic lane change, and further deciphering the complex set of flags the game settings to virtually keep track of the balls and where they are. (Or, more accurately, where it thinks they are).

Of course also shaving a byte here and there to save more room for these changes.... I think an entire rewrite of the self-test area might be in order. It's the only major sub-section I haven't hit yet in the quest for bits.

AS02 with a custom macro file for the stern macros.

I picked up several 68xx era books from amazon but the one I use the most is Tocci/Laskowski Microprocessors and Microcomputers the 6800 Family. The instruction set reference section is a nice layout for when I need to reference individual instructions.

It helps that I knew 6502 from way back when although not to the extent as I do now for the 6800.

Update, finally got the alpha software into the machine, after a left turn putting a different board in there (board in it died in an odd way) -

Working:

Quick shot from outer inlanes to right spinner advances right spinner value. Unfortunately, since they are the 'same' switch, the B standups at the top will also advance the value if you happen to get to the right spinner quickly. To try and mitigate this, a hit to a pop bumper or the 3 bank drops will zero the timer that measures if you hit the right spinner or not. This most likely will make the quick shot not really doable during multiballl.

Bonus ladder advances to 19k, working.
Bonus ladder collects from 19k, working. The 10k element collects first, for as many multipliers as you have, then the 9k elements collect as well, to prevent a strange sound effect over a certain amount.

Self test 'burn in' mode eliminated ok. First press of the self test goes into lamp test. This saved about 30 bytes. If you need to use this, you can put the original rom back in to burn in if you want, or any other stern mpu200 rom.

Several of the new techniques used in the meteor and 9 ball projects are also working here, this is all backend stuff that's not user facing in anyway, but are adding up to saving about 100 bytes overall.

Not working:

Lane change does not work as expected. The letters rotate as they should, but are not 'kept track of' properly. Eventually, what happens is lit lanes will not turn off.
There is likely a separate register somewhere that controls this. I'm not so sure I like the idea of lane change, still.

I do like the idea of spotting a letter somewhere, maybe on a 'quick shot' from the inlanes to either the center spot target, or the lock shot. Maybe a sweep of the 3 bank would spot as well? Most people have agreed that a spot from just hitting the lock lane is too easy, but the element of quick shot would negate that ease.

Forgot to test: (Whoops!)

Free play. I don't see why it wouldn't work, but I do need to specifically test it. Next time I'm in the gameroom I'll try it. (It's the exact same routine as other free play stern games, like meteor I've been working on).

Dips for speech and background sound - to save room in the rom, the game will assume that speech is always enabled, as it background sound. I maybe revisit how these work in the future as it's not too much space (maybe 15 bytes) to leave them in.

Still to be written:

The speed spotting as detailed above

Knocker code for specials and replays, using the coin lockout circuit. (All other solenoid drives are used already in this game).

Multiball code involving no re-locking.

Multiball code for 2x/3x scoring.

Spinner counters, for fun

Ability to set the standup special to pay an extra ball independently of the outlane specials, so you can earn an extra ball. Will change criteria for lighting the special possibly to something other than what it is now (I think completing blast off the second time after starting multiball lights it now?)

Anything else that sounds fun and exciting from this thread so far. You can't get REALLY complex because there's simply no more resources available (mainly Ram) to do so. Everything so far tags onto something that's already existing in the code.

I have 138 bytes currently free at the top of u6 to do this. Doesn't seem like a lot but it should suffice. The largest code block will be the spotting of letters, the rest of the stuff to be added can utilize the already existing code for other things, and the stern pigs language can be very efficient in its space requirements. Not quite as efficient as Williams' Pinbol coding, but close. (For instance.... in pinbol, the command to spot the next letter in a string would be 2 bytes. In Pigs/assembly, it's going to be more than that although how much more remains to be seen. Spotting BLAST code already exists so just have to right "off" code.)

Wait, the spot blast when lit standup spots the entire word??!?! That's ridiculous. Shows how much I shoot that center target.... it's a drain monster on mine/tight shot.

So no reuse of that code that makes it kind of easier as the code will be the same for blast off spotting, instead of 2 separate ones.

Who thinks I should swipe the "hurry" speech out of Split second and add it to the quickshot options?? (just kidding, that drove me crazy on that game when I had it).

The blast standup has the advantage of already having text that indicates it spots something. The old way I did it in 2012 or so was just to spot a letter on every lock shot after you had 2 locked, but that ended up being a little too easy.

The relock issue is most of the reason why I'm even doing this (well, that and 2x/3x multiplier during multiball).

You could always set the 2 F's to be collected together although that just means you have to get at least one of them.... at least they were cognizant back then that collecting the F was difficult.

It's funny how the first solid state multiball games were so difficult to acheive multiball on, and they were short when you got it. I think Black Knight's default lock on at all times was a direct reaction to firepower's difficulty. But it was new so maybe it took a while to get the balance.

That's a good idea. I already have the time to shoot it VERY short, as in, you better it hit it first try. No trapping up and measuring your shot.... that cuts down the ability to nail it. I'd recommend everyone reset it each ball as well. The drop bank sweep being lit is a good idea too, I'll add that to a dip setting so people can use/not use it. Maybe even add a double advance if you sweep the right bank since it's so hard (independent of the quick shot). I'd love to be able to change the sound effect for the sweep to the big game 25k sound effect, but there's no room for that in the rom (sounds are pretty memory intensive.... that's probably why they reused the kapow sound so many times in f2k).

Not any more it doesn't

It's most like they realized it was going to be a grind to get multiball so they gave you a carrot afterwards.... to make up for the frustration of multiball being over with relocks.

You can, since the software is exactly the same. I plan on adding compiler time directives to the code so I can slice and dice the options anyway I like, I find that much easier than maintaining multiple codebases now. There wasn't that much space saved by removing the dip code for speech anyway, so it could probably go back in... still have about 70 bytes available. Chasing a couple bugs right now that are most likely caused by my sloppy programming (I'm sure we don't want the right outlane special lighting on the quickshot routine....)

Now tested and working:

Freeplay on/off tested working
Dips for background and speech being eliminated work (i.e. speech and background still there, might add these back in later if I don't need dips or about 10 bytes)

New features, outer inlanes light the quick shot on the right spinner and the center blast. Center blast standup spots the next letter in blast. Right spinner quickshot advances the right spinner. The quickshot timers are different for the right spinner (short) and the center standup (longer)

Fixed the right outlane special bug.

Changed the 10k bonus sound effect to be the regular bonus countdown sound, so that a full 19k*15x bonus collect will 'max' out the sound like the original 10k*15x would have.

There is a bug in the quickshot code, if you don't already have the B or the O collected, you have to collect it and then the quickshot will be available. Clearly an error in execution order on my part.

What do you want the skill shot to do? One lit lane at the top would blink, has to be a lit lane or it messes up the blast off sequence of letters. So once you got LAST there would be no skill shot available.

See the other reply regarding the double F setting.

That is not a software issue.

One thing a lot of people overlook when they adjust slings is if the blades are mangled, you're not going to get the proper adjustment. I replace the blades on all my slings with new, straight blades, and the activation one should just be touching the rubber. Perfect sensitivity and hit with no machine gunning.

I suppose it depends on how good you get at shooting the quickshot right spinner to advance it. Regardless, not removing the dip switch setting to reset/leave the right spinner value so that would be up to the owner which way they prefer.

2000 is still a lot for a single spin, especially one that's really accessible. If it was just the drop bank advancing it I'd say maybe, but I think people are going to practice and get good at the quickshot.

Right now as it stands as well the spot blast is lit for quite some time you could probably trap up and hit it.

So what should the award be? Points, spot a letter, advance the right spinner, spot a letter in OFF instead of blast?
It's surprising how easily a skill shot can be added - if it's more than 10 bytes I'll be surprised. I added one a long time ago to a game and it was 4 extra bytes....

That is already built into the software, but due to the speedy response needed for slings and pops, it resets really quickly. Adding anything onto it is going to change the feel of the sling. Once the code is done I plan on making the source code available so you can play with this if you want, but I don't think that re-writing software to handle what is essentially a hardware issue (and a marginal one, at that) is the goal here. Now, if this were a new game going out on location and I was trying to make it the most reliable possible, sure, why not, but presumably most flight2000's are in people's homes and they should know how to fix the switches properly.

Done, one letter L-A-S-T will be blinking at ball launch (not sure yet if I want to have ANOTHER skill shot after a ball lock.... need to play it a bit first).
If you hit the blinking lane, it will spot a letter in blast off, if that's already completed, it will spot a drop target 5-4-3-2-1, if the countdown has already been completed it will award 25k. Of course, it will also award the blinking lamp if it hadn't been lit previously.

Not sure yet how I feel about the partial step back on the spinner - it really depends on if I can get dialed in on the quickshot to advance it. (I have a fatter post/rubber than normal protecting that shot on mine so it's not a gimmee). I think that might be confusing to some if you advance the spinner to 4.5k and it doesn't stay there OR reset to zero.

There are some new bugs as I've progressed with testing, not a bug necessarily, but the blinking lamp on the top lane blinks WAY too fast (about twice as fast as the drop that's blinking) so I'm going to change the blink rate for that lamp. Secondly, and obviously more serious, is that the multiball start no longer works. I'm going to temporarily blow back an older version of the code into the game to try and determine when and what I did to break this.

Since I now archive EVERY build of the game I can compare at least and not have to re-create source code that's been supplanted/updated, this might be easier, but there's been probably about 100 test builds of the software so far so I hope this is just some boneheaded mistake instead of something endemically wrong with the code shifting/reassembly. I did notice as well that spot blast still lights at the start of the non-starting multiball, and I specifically turn that off (since its now part of the quickshot routines).

I haven't, I have to modify the code first that checks for max credits to repurpose the coin lockout - believe it or not, they don't check the max credits by comparing one value (the max) to the current credits.... they look at the status of the coin lockout instead! Probably because it's easier to do that in the pigs code vs. straight assembly. IIRC in later games that eliminated the coin lockout entirely, they still use it as if it were there the same way.

Codebase is starting to get full again, the skill shot was a wee bit more than the 10 bytes I was hoping for, even if it was just canned at one award. Still 67 bytes available though.

Update, so, in my zeal to cut and paste things, I put a label in the wrong spot, so the 'binc' command was never actually incrementing B. It's only used ONCE in flight 2000, and it happened to be at the multiball start. But now, there's another issue, the left spinner once multiball starts, scores 500 per letter, so the multiball start you get a TON of 500 points just being added. (This is the routine that the binc is in....) So there must be a flaw in my logic.... I added a slight delay loop to the left spinner and if you start multiball without hitting the spinner (obvi bypassing it in test with the glass off), works fine. The spinner will spin, but never scores, and eventually crashes.

At least I've got a starting point to fix this.

Found a couple more bugs in the way the skill shot is handled, that I'll have to nail down. Roughed in a bit of code to allow the knocker to be installed although that's not completed yet.

Glad I got the eeproms so I don't have to periodically load up 40 into my eraser like I used to

So, the issue turned out to be a change I'd made to the way the score gets handled directly (as opposed to being queued, which happens in the background when nothing else is going on, even though the routine uses the same score routine) - there was no byte savings in doing it the 'new' way (checking the tilt lamp via the pigs routines vs. just doing it in assembly) - the value of B that the spinner routine was expecting would range randomly. (I'm used to the way williams did it in pinbol, where they always specifically save the values of A and B every trip into and out of their interpreter). It is possible that this bug was in the 9 ball test code as well, although it depends on if there were any "score $<somevalue> followed directly by anything that was expecting the value of B to be the same. Meteor7 didn't have this issue as the score routines were semi-different.

Still have to finish up the skill shot issue (Lane Lamp stays lit on the lane although it puts it on the left side, and spots the next letter correctly, and once you collect blast off the letters B and O start to spot the drop bank in error), and add the knocker code (and a physical knocker, to test....) Once the skill shot issue is fixed I'll ship the beta binary rom off to @coyote to put on his website so people can download it and try it out.

I still have to add in the no-relock during multiball, dips to turn on/off any of these features, and I'd like to add a feature that resets the 5-4-3-2-1 progress once you complete blast off and get 2 balls locked (It was always strange to me that you could get, all systems ready, commence countdown.... and the countdown was at 1 if that's where you had built the drops down to....)

If there's some dips available I'll try and put the right spinner reset to 2000 although I don't think I'll ever personally use this.... and yeah, I have to add in the spinner counters..... but then I might just call it 'done', at that point. (Is anything ever really 'done' though??)

I got mine from Amazon so I paid a little more - I think they were new as well although it doesn't really matter with eeproms as long as they erase and reprogram. Look at that, pinball eproms, we were recycling before it was fashionable.

Bill do you have any concrete evidence on the Gamatron story or just your hunch? I have a hunch that 9 ball was originally supposed to be a single ball game and they whacked the multiball stuff in later, but that's just a hunch. I know you've been touting the gamatron theory for a couple years, but I think it's just a theory. Gamatron does flow nicely but the sheer real estate taken up by the ball maze I don't think they would have gone for.

There's no switches available for lane change anyway without rewiring something, so it would have had to have been some kind of automatic lane change - which turned out to really suck in the game. (You'd get multiple completions of BLAST and OFF.... it just confused the game too much as the lane changes)

I don't think there's anything wrong with Seawitch's code as shipped from the factory, except maybe something for completing consecutive loops. What should be changed? I'm prepared to disagree

Interesting realization in the code... I was wondering why they were setting lamp $3a when paying out a replay and then clearing it, I figured it was to prevent re-entrancy into the routine, but they don't actually check it anywhere.... it's turned on, slight delay, then turned off.

Thanks to @inkochnito's tech chart from the flight2k owner's club, I see it's wired into j2-2, which has no connection. So, looks like stern put knocker code STOCK in the game! You just have to wire up a small control circuit (like a gottlieb pop bumper driver board) into that connection and a knocker and it will knock stock!

I wrote a test rom routine in the last couple days to track what some of the slightly arcane memory locations do.... I know how to check for multiball, too, so should be able to code in the no relock during multiball. Good thing I did the test rom because the ball walker makes a 'virtual' switch closure for each ball it 'thinks' is in there. Since there's only the one physical switch at the start, it has no way to double check that info, so it never clears it unless balls get locked in it and moved down (from multiball start).

I call this 'heading a future bug off at the pass', because I certainly would have fallen into the trap of not knowing why my ball was ending after one drain.

I don't even see how switches could be installed in the ball walker mech - that would really be a challenge.

I'm going to go throw 2 balls at once into the test rom to see how smart the walker code is.

So really the change is adding in the stars? That would make it more lucrative, max before you get all 11 drops down at least once is 40k - so comparable to a full bonus collect on the drops at 39k. Then that final 11th target, to double it to 84k.

I don't think counting the downed drops would be the way to go..... probably the way to go is to NOT like the shot doubler unless you repeat the loop..... so 4 stars down, 11 targets, 1st loop is 44k, 2nd loop is 88k. Maybe even subsequent loops keep adding up to a certain amount, since repeatable loops on seawitch are just about impossible. Any target other than the spinner and the top rollover cancel the 2x.... and you could tie the 2 together so that weak shot to top won't give it, you have to see top rollover and then spinner to collect it/light it.

Go over and vote on the next disassembly poll for seawitch if you haven't already

Likely someone swapped a bottom board from another stern game into it. That's the way stock stern knockers were, with a metal plate attached to the cabinet side.

I've been adding that to the other sterns and ballys I've been working on so no reason why it can't go into F2k as well.

I've been working on 9 ball and a couple other things mainly for the last couple weeks but the beta test of F2k where it is now will be stress tested this weekend.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/9-ball-software-rewrite

So just looked at the code that does this - and there's an unexpected issue with leaving this even for one player games, since you can drop out of order targets and they would be down at ball end - needing a reset and setup of the current 5 bank status anyway. Now, I could specifically test for this type of condition, but we'd start to get into extra byte creep.... trying to go the OTHER direction. I think I've pared out as much as I can with the OS and I'm now looking at what else can be trimmed to make some more space. If I get enough space, certainly, stuff like this can be added. I will add the 3 bank in like I have with Meteor, Big Game, and 9 ball.

I got some space back in the bootup sequence, it now fires the ball walker 3 times which would clear all balls out of it and lets the game itself detect that there's balls in the kickbigs in the maze, which will then eject them. That made a 30 byte routine pare down to 8 or so. Just have to keep shaving stuff out to get the rest of the stuff in.

A major section I think will be self-test - there's likely some bloat there or decisions to be made on things like, do we *REALLY* need the 'walking 8' during the display test? I guess it would be helpful in fixing things, but you could always pop a test rom chip in there if you need to diagnose displays (or if you have a test fixture setup, you're not using the built in diagnostics anyway.) I'm trying to leave as much of the game as stock as possible to get these changes in.

The crunching techniques are going to go a long way once other games get disassembled - for instance, Quicksilver's rom is pretty much 100% full. Some hack I did in the past to reset the multiplier entailed going through 3 or 4 separate free space areas to do it. (This was a patch vs. a recompile) With the crunchdown applied I think it's 100-200 bytes freed up.

It depends on the game, though, if it makes heavy usage of the storebmem, loadbmem functions from the zero page and lots of lines of "lampoff $09, lampoff $0d, lampoff $32, etc. all in a row, lots of space can be saved, but games like flight 2000 where there's not a lot of duplicated commands (but with different parameters, or zero page addresses which would save a byte, per.) the savings was minimal.

I need to roll a rom now with the sound data successfully relocating itself, to make sure the codebase is 100% relocatable (within reason.... the switch function table and pigs function tables need to stay on a page boundry)

Burn in test is already gone.

You can't make the ball walker a shorter time, the finger from the next one down will send the ball back up instead of down.... has to be down for that extended period for the ball to make it to the next spot. I played around with this timing on almost every test rom I've put in, and the stock interval works the best.

Small update, I'm running through the sound and speech data and determining what loads an address that needs to be relocatable and what doesn't. Testing slowly for this to make sure I don't break something massively.

The Mpu200 games seem to all have slightly different sound engines, or at least, very different from flight 2000's. Probably why when I tried to transplant sounds from one to another it just didn't work.

I have about 50 bytes free right now to add score multipliers, spinner displays, and all the other goodies I wanted to add. Hint: it's not going to be enough! Really combing through the code at this point using every trick to squeeze bytes I've ever seen in the past or heard of. If nothing else this is a great learning experience.

Ok, I am officially a dummy.... the sound wasn't working for the default sound queues because I never set the X register to the pointer to the start of the sound effects! Although there were some more commands that needed tweaking as they reload sounds etc. from different places.

This is the current version, of which I think I got almost everything in that people wanted.... but the drop not resetting wasn't one of them.... sorry.... turns out the 3 bank routine also starts some background processes that are essential. There are 5 bytes free in the lower range and 13 in the upper! That's crazy especially when you compare it to the original software, which had ONE in the lower range, and 4 in the upper! (So with the mods... ended up with MORE free space than stock!)

I tested it out, and boy does the 3x playfield scoring have some major potential. Just for starting multiball, you get 3x40k for EACH time blast off counts down..... so 360k for starting multiball.... plus 30k for the maze kickouts.

Here are the overviews of the gameplay changes:

2x/3x scoring during multiball depending on # of balls in play
No relock during multiball, balls to ball walker will eject through the maze.
2_ or 3_ will blit onto the ball in play display to indicate scoring level active.

Skill shot, one of the 4 lanes at the top will blink at ball start, hit this lane will collect an extra blast off letter, unless all lit, then will collect 5-4-3-2-1 drop, if they're all lit, will score 25k (plus the original lamp score).

Quick shot, B/O lanes will light the spot blast standup for a short time, hit it to spot a letter. Also, quick react to the right spinner will advance it once (not if it was already spinning, though. Neither quickshot will light during multiball, and spot blast will not light during multiball either (normally it lights in multiball)

Bonus ladder goes to 19k instead of 10k. 10k element collects first*multipliers, then 9k-1k collect (so the sound will never overrun, like my decade old mod for the 19k)

Maxcredits 99.... dip 19 now controls free play on/off.

Spinners will count up on ball in play display for a short time. Due to romspace limitations, these will be additive (right AND left spinners will both add, so if one's spinning and other is too, they both add for a total spin count.)

If you didn't lock 2 balls in the walker, you do not get the 10k per maze kickout until you have earned 2 locks. This prevents player 2 from gaining an advantage by shooting the walker after player 1 put 2 balls in it. During multiball they will always score the 10k*pf multiplier.

That's the gameplay changes, operating system changes follow....

All displays at game end will be active, non-playing players will just show 00.

If the HSTD is <100k, all the leading zeroes will show. Once >100k, the leading zeroes will be blanked.

First press of self test will no longer be a burn in test.... just goes straight to lamp test.

Version # of the software will show on display at startup.

Ball walker routine at power up changed, the walker just fires 3 times which should be enough to clear the balls. The regular maze switches will clear the maze.

I had to make a LOT of changes to the operating system to add these features, and I'm pleased that it ended up fitting in a NORMAL romspace! These techniques can be applied to other stern games so that mods will be possible that just weren't in the past without going to a larger romspace. Already in progress is the 9 ball software, and the Galaxy disassembly. Galaxy won't need the crunching techniques because there's plenty of free space already available.... although if more is needed, crunch can be applied.

Once I fix a timing issue on the walker eject and play test this a bit I'll send it off to Coyote to post on his website.

55k * 15x is 825k.... that's a LOT. I'm not sure how much I like the (Factorial?) bonus - I did that on trident and it was terrible. (I learned what NOT to do with a game on that one, it was "too much", too many high building bonuses). Also, I'd have to make more space in the rom for the routine's changes, and believe me when I tell you that I don't think there's anything left to shave..... I mean I was relocating giant sections of code at the end here to save ONE BYTE.

I don't think people necessarily shoot for 'bonus' on flight, you actually just kind of 'collect' it as you bop along. Pretty different from other stern games treatment of it that's for sure..... very traditional, Bally/Williams like, where you get bonus steps through lanes, mainly..... actually I think that's the only thing that pays bonus steps on f2k.

I really like the factorial (that might not be the right description) ramp UP on meteor, now, THAT makes shooting the bonus worth something, granted, it's a max of 7k and a good spinner rip is going to kill it no matter what. Let's see, shoot the 2 bank for 21k+possible 25k sweep on the mod romset, or rip the spinner ONCE and get >100k? Although my spinner lane is very tight with fat rubber, you really have to nail it to get it.

I would have loved to know the thinking behind some of the choices made in the software - I just found a strange one, I noticed that the spinners (specifically the left one) have a function to not score at certain times.... very odd. Turns out that when you rip the left spinner to lock a ball, while the ball launch is going on, you get NOTHING for the spins! Hey BPfutz, that's a flat out RIPOFF. So, great rip, you can see it count up with the new software, then it pauses with no countup, ball launches, it starts counting again! This could be very significant points when the spinner is lit (500 per lit letter in this mode..... so 4000/spin lost....)

Guess what I'm going to change in the next revision!

Big Game has specific code in it to make sure you get EVERY spin when you rip the left spinner and hit the saucer.... it waits until the spinner is done before processing the saucer.

No, there's no room for dips on each change. (the rom was full to start with, and it's full again.) Also, some of the mod code completely changes the routines, there would have to be parallel routines to use/not use some of the changes. Do you have your game set to 5 balls per game? Those are pretty high scores. I have my game set pretty hard though, with fat rubber on the tight shot entrances. Most of the time I'm trying to hit the lock after it's ready and almost but not quite getting it.

I didn't do anything with the special, but I think there does need to be a way to get extra ball. Too bad the special spot doesn't say "WOW" instead of special. I'd have to think of what needs to occur to earn an extra ball since there's nothing on the PF indicating that.

For people that want to add a knocker, you can rig something with the stock software and use the signal from the lower left lamp connector pin 2 to a knocker - that lamp lights with a short pulse for each credit earned - I think they never added the circuit board to do so because the all lamps test would fire the knocker, and for some reason it only pulses once for a hstd win/multiple matches (probably timing).

I'm going to go back to my original plan and use the coin lockout circuit for the knocker instead with custom code to control it.

That's your first misstep - thresholds should pay replays!

Oh, and making a /10 rom would be no problem, it's actually really easy to do on a stern game. I did inadvertently turn it over in testing due to a bug in the code where the score multiplier went from 3x to 255x..... oops. The ball drained out of multiball at the EXACT moment that the last ball was hitting the ball walker (and the code that handles the multiplier must have JUST been running then....)

Set your specials to pay extra balls! That's probably what I will add - for the blast standup, pay extra ball instead of special. Maybe light it every time that you spell BLAST OFF, and have it turn on and off with various hits, just like the sweep lamp does.... although that annoys me and I might just make the option to have the sweep lamp on all the time that the 3 drops are up.

This is still in progress despite my other projects. I like to flit around from one to another as often one solution in one game helps with a problem in another.

Everything is actually working except for tiny tweaks here and there.

I'm debugging a couple final routines and I just received the knocker parts to make sure that's working but development hasn't stopped.

Good news - the knocker code works. I decided against leaving in the 'original' knocker code we discovered a while back in the game, because it requires building a small driver board, and the knocker would knock continuously in lamp test. The new code uses the coin lockout coin connection, and I've added a 1 amp slow blow fuse in line with it just in case it gets locked on. Marcospec sells a similar to original stern knocker mech, with a nice, fat, plastic plunger that sounds fantastic. https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/500-5081-00 I made a cabinet metal receiver out of an old rusty/pitted bally shooter lane guide pounded flat (hey, I"m sort of thrifty.... I actually tried to build a knocker mech first out of old bally linear slingshot parts, but I couldn't get the throw on the plunger I needed....).

The last couple things to do on the software still involve the balls releasing during multiball - they will release if you shoot them back in, but if you shoot TWO in at the same time I need to be able to handle that, as well as giving you the score for the maze exits. I'm going to remove the playfield multiplied scoring during multiball, it makes it WAY too easy to run away on the game. Also, I'll make the center blast up special pay an extra ball instead of special (the outlane specials will still be specials), all depending on the dip switch settings, of course.

There's about 15 bytes free in the codebase right now, which is a miracle when you consider that the rom was FULL before I started (the original roms have *FIVE* bytes free.) So after all the changes (posted below) and not losing any audits/adjustments and slight changes to the behavior of the game, there's more free space.

As soon as the last couple bugs/quirks are gone I'll post a link to download the software.

GAMEPLAY CHANGES
======== =======

BONUS LADDER
===== ======
Bonus ladder goes to 19k instead of 10k.
Bonus 10k element adds first times multiplier,
then 9k-1k counts down with multiplier. This
is to prevent a sound overrun with the higher
bonus potential.

SKILL SHOT
===== ====
One of the 4 top lanes LAST blinks at ball
start. Making blinking lane spots additional
letter in BLAST OFF. The blinking letter is
also spotted if not already collected.

If Blast off completed, blinking lane
spots next drop 5-4-3-2-1.

If 5-4-3-2-1 sequence already completed,
blinking lane awards 25k plus normal score.

The skill shot is only available at ball start,
not when locking balls and additional balls
launched from shooter lane.

FREE PLAY
==== ====
Maximum credits always 99.
Set dip 19 to ON for free play.
Game will always start on free play even if
00 showing in credits remaining display.

QUICK SHOT
===== ====
Making B or O inlanes lights Spot Blast for
a short period - making spot blast when lit
awards 25k and next letter in BLAST OFF
sequence, as well as advancing bonus multiplier.

Right spinner if made during quick shot period
(1/2 the time the spot blast is lit) will advance
the spinner one step. If the spinner was already
spinning quick shot does not light on the spinner,
but will light on the spot blast.

MULTIBALL
=========
During multiball, balls shot into the ball walker
will eject and not remain. Maze ejects always
score 10k in multiball.

Achieving multiball no longer lights the spot BLAST
standup target - only the quick shot will light
this target. During multiball, quick shot does NOT
advance the right spinner value, but the 3 bank drop
will still advance the right spinner value.

SPINNERS
========
Right and Left spinner will show # of spins
on ball in play display. The right spinner has
priority and will 'take over' from the left
spinner if both happen to be active. If the right
spinner is active and the left spinner is hit,
the right spinner amount will remain. After a
short period, the spinner counter will return
to the ball in play.

Left spinner has been adjusted to score ALL spins.
Factory behavior was to prevent scoring during
certain ball walker behaviors.

SCORE LEVELING
===== ========
Players only receive 10k per kickout after
locking 2 balls in walker (i.e., if player 1
had 2 balls locked, player 2 only gets the
additional score once they too, have locked
2 balls. This includes ball locks that are
set to carry over game to game - each player
must put 2 balls in the lock before the 10k
per maze eject is awarded. This is for
fairness in tournaments.

KNOCKER
=======
Disconnect the wiring running to the coin door
lockout coil and reroute them to a knocker
installed near the transformer. Yellow-white
wire goes to the non-banded side of the diode
on the knocker coil. All credits won via
score levels, specials, and high score to date
awards will knock appropriately.

CHANGES RELATED TO SYSTEM BEHAVIORS
======= ======= == ====== =========
Due to operating system changes related to
making more rom space available, at game over
non-playing players will have 00 in their player
displays rather than being blank.

If the HSTD happens to be less than 100k (likely
not for long) the game will display leading zeroes
for whatever digits 100k-10 instead of blanks.
This is done again to carve free bytes into the
software to make room for the enhancements.

HSTD will only be awarded based on the nearest 100s.
(i.e. you must beat the high score by at least 100
points to be awarded the hstd. Due to the rarity of
beating the score by so little this was done as a
trade-off to again, save space.)

Additionally, the first press of the self-test
button on the coin door no longer goes directly
into a burn-in test - it instead goes directly
to the lamp test. Again, this is to save space
in the operating system.

There were many changes made to the operating system
to allow these enhancements to be added to the game
without losing any player-facing gameplay. All
adjustments and audits are still intact, including
all coin ratios.

Version of the software installed appears in the match
display at power up.

Walker empties during multiball, so it's not holding it up there. I just removed the multiplied scoring because as someone else pointed out, it overpowers the game too much, which is borne out in my testing. The left spinner could be worth up to 12k/spin, and the right spinner 20k/spin - just too high IMO.

So you want the wow to be 100k instead of an extra ball, and repeatable after <something>. Probably a relock to the walker could reset the wow?

Maybe during multiball, since the blast off letters reset, each shot to the lock will recollect whatever letters are lit for 5k/letter in each maze kickout - and if you complete the blast off it will relight the wow. I almost always hit the lock lane by reflex in multiball anyway, which is frustrating on the regular rules because it nerfs your multiball.

After I removed the score multiplier code, there's about 40 bytes free again.

Now, that's a pretty good idea, 2x scoring until the ball hits the right kickbig - once that fires, 2x over. And only when you hit it back in. I'll see if I can shoehorn that in.....

I've had that happen as well. Originally, I was going to add 2 switches to the walker - but I couldn't figure out an easy way to do that since all the hardware is in the way. I thought about optos and then I said "nnnnahhh"

The walker is going to naturally take longer to settle, because I'm going to hold off on stepping it if the left spinner is still going (you get ripped off of all spins while it's stepping....).

OK now implemented the Zacaj multiball rule - shoot the ball into the walker during multiball, enjoy 2x scoring until it leaves the maze (it's on a timer, not necessarily the actual right kickbig switch.... I thought about making it settable via the coin door, but the maximum timer value you can put on a single timer is about right for it. Now, some incentive to actually hit the ball into the walker during multiball that doesn't turn into the trite "go for the jackpot" type of thing.

And no, I don't want to make it 3x scoring while in the maze for 2 balls in there, so don't ask!

I still have to tweak 2 things, I guess the maze kickbigs will score 20k during the multi reentry as well, that way a shot to the walker is 50k total, 10k for entering, then 10k*2 for each of 2 kickbigs. The other thing is to play with the walker timing re: the spinner.

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

anyone that wants to grab test version 33 build 3 link is above. I believe it should be working and just might need little tweaks.

Something else I've discovered that happens on ALL stern games - when you're winning a credit, depending on what else is happening, you may or may not get credit for fast spinners, for instance! So for tournaments or where your final score REALLY matters, disable replays by setting all the replay levels to 00!

Once the tweaking is finished the source code will be on the google site as well.

The final tally is *THREE* bytes free in the entire codebase. I started with five free, so I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out.

The gammatron version might be getting tested as well, there's more tweaks to be done to that because the lanes at the top are different, so the skill shot has to be modified. That's a future thing, and it might not even be able to work 100% with the changes because they really moved around some of the switches on the playfield.

I'm not sure what variants of the weebly board would be for what - I use the 512 version which is what the 512 image in the zip is for. The 716 images in the zip are for the original mpu200 - if you have yours jumpered for 4x2732, you would combine the 716 into 732 by using the dos commands:
copy /b CPU_U1.716 + CPU_U2.716 CPU_U2.732
copy /b CPU_U5.716 + CPU_U6.716 CPU_U6.732

I suppose I could just do this in the zip for people in future revs - I did find a problem with the skill shot coding, which had been solid up to this point, but without much playtesting of it (I was mainly playtesting the other features playing with the way they work). There will be a new revision posted later today. The first revision won't break anything, it just won't work the way you'd think it should, sometimes.

OK, new file is up there with all 3 file formats (716, 732, 512). Looks like the skill shot is better coded now, and I saved some more rom space as well. (It was getting REALLY tight.... There's now 4 bytes free in the lower space, and 14 in the upper. Doesn't sound like much, but remember the original rom had less than that.... The zip will contain f2k-3304.512 so you know it's the right version, I doubt that I updated the text files inside it yet though, oops.

Way back when I wasn't optimizing the code at all because of the weebly board's larger romspace for development, I wrote the skill shot code really sloppily, with some extra checks etc. that it turns out I didn't need. I was originally using the rollover lamps to track things like which lamp to spot - which got tricky because the skill shot lamp blinks so you have to track if you had gotten it already. The bug was when you hadn't gotten the skill shot lamp, but it was the next lamp to be spotted anyway - so your skill shot would give you nothing.

I fixed this by using the left lane lamps instead to award the next letter, since they aren't blinking, and they are tracking your progress correctly.

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm

New version 3306, bug in [new] skill shot code - was going out but could still collect.

Also, in trying to break things, if you have 3 balls in the walker and you restart the game, the balls will just stay there. This is probably dependent on how your walker entry switch is - on mine, the ball sits in front of it vs. holding it down. I might have to change that wireform, because if it missed the switch entry, you're dead in the water. There's now only 6 bytes free in the code so this is probably not going to be able to be fixed at this point, and hopefully won't happen too much.

Another day, another skill shot bug.... this is proving to be harder to quash within the rom limitations than I thought. It's the way Stern is fooling the game into re-launching the ball, they are actually clearing the score (playfield validation) flag to do so.... which I'm also using to make sure the skill shot is off.

Hopefully everyone ordered eeproms they are a lot faster to erase and reburn

Everyone post when you're burning these and results - I'm going to leave the 'major' # at 33, but instead of the 33 showing in the match window at bootup, it will show the 'minor' number.... which is about to be bumped up to '08'. (There will never be decade minor numbers, ie. 10, 20, 30, because it looks too much like a match.) I'm leaving the major at 33 since the feature set is 'complete' right now, the minor number is me fixing bugs, and looks like most of the bugs are in the skill shot code.

What might be considered a bug but isnt', is that the "B" standups at the top are the same switch as the "B" rollover inlane, so the 'quick shot' it is possible to hit the standup B, and go DOWN through the right spinner, which would score the quickshot. The quickshot is killed if either pop or a drop is hit though, so it usually won't happen, but of course it happened for me yesterday. Like old Colecovision manuals used to say, the Joy of Discovery... which I always took to mean "any bugs you find are actually features". Side note... a friend always told me CV games were written in Pascal and I pooh-pooh'd it, turns out parts of them were. Who knew? I wouldn't think Pascal was a good programming language for games programming, but I guess anything can be. They probably used it for the powerful boolean logic built into it.

OK, I think I've got this bug nailed down. The skill shot shouldn't reset the letters anymore.... I did it without adding code, I just branched 2 bytes beyond the original instruction that reset the score flag - no reason to actually reset it.

I also found out that flight 2000 counts ball locks as another ball played - this is really inaccurate, and would throw off operators that were looked at balls played/# of balls per game to see how their earnings/difficulty were going. So I removed this 'feature', since not only does it throw off the # of balls played, it's not even consistently accurate in regards to what it's supposed to track, itself - balls launched out of the walker do NOT add to this count (if it was intended to track ball locks+balls played).

Oh, and audit 15 always was the # of multiballs started - not documented in the manual (since they likely just copied it over from earlier manually)

I thought of some new features, as well - when you're ready to start multiball, the game always starts of whatever # drop you have down, I propose to make an option to make it harder by resetting this to drop 5 again.

Also, the turning on and off of the drop bank sweep lamp is silly - you rarely get it anyway, so anytime the 3 drops are all up, the light should be on as well (and go off, of course, when you hit less than all 3 down)

Thoughts on this?

I'm including the 512 image in the zip file so noone should need to do this - you do not need the final U2 copy in there either, and technically, you only need the last 8 bytes of U6 at the "top" of the 512 image. This is the way I am supplying it (on the 512 board you don't need the last 8 bytes at 5ff8-5fff, either, which would net me 8 bytes, but at the expense of the rom not working on original hardware, so that's not going anywhere).

Eventually the 512 image will have its source code embedded into the rom file, for future generations to discover and enjoy. I've tested this with Meteor and I like that anyone that happens to grab the file will also have a copy of the source code (although they'll have to figure out how to extract it)

BTW everyone should thank Andrew for his board, because without it, this development could not take place - the extra ram and rom enable me to do debugging things that I wouldn't be able to do on the original boards, to determine what the code is doing on actual hardware - sometimes what happens on pinmame doesn't translate into the hardware.

I'm REALLY loving the knocker in the game, it was glaringly missing prior.

Another day, another bug.... now in the bonus countdown.... first, was too much, then too little. Should be just right now, file updated again.

I think you get more score for the blinking target (5k vs. 500).

Let's see if I can wrangle more free space out of the code - I had it up to about 4 free in the lower area and 16 in the upper, but fixing the skill shot bugs and bonus count bugs removed all of the upper.

I can get a couple bytes back by removing the on/off strobing of the sweep lamp - I feel that if the drop bank is UP, you should be able to sweep it.

I'm playing with getting the 5 bank to reset, it 'works' but its dropping the 5 all the time and it shouldn't.

While playing around, I found what may be another factory bug - the outlanes clearly state "25k" - Which it does award *if* you consider that the lit drop is going to give you 5k. The actual routine only gives you 20k.

So.... should it be 25k, AND the drop spot 5k, or is it considered 25k total WITH the spotted drop? It could be interpreted either way.

Interestingly as well, if it's spotting the 1 drop in order, it's going to score the extra bonus associated with that. So I think it should actually be 25k PLUS whatever the drop awards.

Decided to leave the outlane scoring the way it is.

Added the following new feature:

Dip 18, ON=reset 5 bank to 5 when multiball qualified - speech says "commence countdown" - which will re-start at 5 instead of wherever you happened to have the drop bank at the time. Turn dip 18 off for factory style behavior, if you were on 1 drop needed, you still are.

Dip 23 ON=Center standup target WOW pays extra ball. Ignore dip 31/32 values for special and pays an extra ball when Wow is lit. Wow is pretty hard to light here, so it won't turn on/off with sling hits once you have it lit. Have to test to see if it will relight on the next ball which I'd rather it didn't.
The outlanes specials will pay whatever dip 31/32 says to pay so you can have an on playfield extra ball but still win credits on the other WOW's.

Revamped the bonus countdown to countdown in order 19k-0k, because it bothered me I couldn't fit the code in to step down the multiplier lamps when the 10k was added at a time - users of the very old 19k code from about 10 years ago might remember there was a sound screw up on bonus collection >155k or so - this has been eliminated, and the bonus countdown will go very quickly if you have a lot of bonus to collect.

Updated beta software if you want to test it out is at: https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

Reports as version 17 in match display on bootup - this is the 'minor' revision #, the major revision is still 33.

Thanks to the revamping of the bonus code, I managed to get about 20 bytes back free enabling me to add the extra ball and countdown features.

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

Ver 19, added a test for dip 13 on the skill shot spot, if the letter to be spotted happens to be the "F", it will check the dip for the inlane F to see if it should spot one, or 2.

Added additional code to attempt to prevent the standup B's at the top from activating the Quick Shot. It will still happen sometimes, though, the only true way to alleviate this is to either make the quickshot activation the F lanes instead of the B and O lanes, or to separate out the top B's from the inlanes (not possible without rewiring of some switches)

That happens with the original sometimes as well, it's because the trough switches with 2 or 3 balls in there will launch one BACKWARDS when launching a ball, if it hangs out on the leftmost switch long enough, it will launch another ball because it thinks there's too many there. Stern didn't get their multiball trough solid until Catacomb, Lightning, or Free Fall (whichever one has the switches mounted vertically under the trough, I know Catacomb for sure, not sure about the other 2).

Now that I'm thinking of it I think flight 2000 was the machine that had 2 styles of trough - which do you have? Mine is the one with the solenoid mounted below the playfield, (earlier style per ipdb) and when the arm comes up due to its shape it can push the other balls back. The later style doesn't seem to have this issue, and it's just a normal outhole ball kicker as seen on Williams and some other stern games.... I might change mine at some point to that style.

It doesn't happen too often, but since Stern themselves changed the design midway through, they might have had an issue as well. Flight's multiball handling is usually pretty good, but it's not 100% obviously. It's really bad when you have a ball hang up on the ball walker entry, my old playfield had a divot there and balls would get stuck occasionally. I should see if I can get a Cliffy slot protector on the new PF so that a divot doesn't wear there over time. Happens with a fast moving ball slamming into the ball walker arm. (Which also gets damaged).

I did notice that occasionally the left spinner will score the points fine, but the code to count the spinner doesn't 'catch up' - there's probably a timer conflict going on. Unfortunate when that happens, because then the walker won't wait for the spinner to finish. (The pulse to the walker mechanism is REALLY long, so multiple switch activations will only end up as ONE switch during each of the step pulses.)

Reaching the end of this project, as much as I ever call things "done" - here's the change log/buglist over the course - I know there's a couple more tweaks/bugs to fix, mainly with the quickshot and the left spinner. I have 3 bytes free right now....

I might try and do a "weebly board special edition" - with sound effects from other games, possibly add some speech from other games - the speech chip on flight 2000 is a 2716, so it can be doubled up with data from other stern talking games. What words/phrases might be good to grab? Orbitor one has "tilt, tilt tilt" and "stern is great" - NO WAY am I adding in the "shoot pinball again" from O1 though, nor "hurry.... hurry.... hurry....." from Split Second.... those sound bytes were 2 of the reasons I even sold those games.

Log follows

;eliminate dip 17, speech on/off (speech always enabled) ==>test ok
;eliminate dip 8, bg sound on/off (background always enabled)=>test ok
;eliminate dips 18-19, max credits, max credits 99 ==>test ok
;change bonus ladder advance to go to 19k ==>test ok
;change bonus collection to go to 19k ==>test ok
;added dip 19, free play on/off ==>test ok
;added quick shot advance to outer inlanes and right spinner==>test ok
;added quick shot spot blast to outer inlanes as well ==>test ok
;added spot letter routine ==>test ok

;notes on changed behaviors:

;non playing players at end of game have 00 for score instead of blank (like bally, gottlieb, etc)
;blast being lit only spots letters, not the entire word.
;10k bonus count adds first, 10k at a time, uses same sound/ramp so max bonus collect still full gamut of sounds

;eliminated mods:

;spinner/sling/pop controlled lane change ==>needs test in game, DOESN'T WORK - never "completes" letters

;bugs:
;v11,12,13
;right lane special lights with bonus add/score
; FIXED======> test ok
; was doing a 'orb, sta' sequence.... dummy!!

;v11,12,13
;ball maze never fires right kickbig, switch ok, solenoid test ok
; FIXED======> test ok
; testing one function less than should breaks new swi routine, changed test 13 to test 14 instead
;

;v14
;noticed that you have to have already collected the B or O to light the spot letter i.e. won't do it on the first time through
; FIXED======> test ok, but new bug (below)
; rearranged letter processing

;v15
;F letter collects both but then swaps lit F back and forth
;B/O lanes also spot 5-4-3-2-1 in error
; FIXED======> test ok
; saved B was offset +8 from setting left lane lamp, added correction factor

;v17
;added 'trip_switch' - takes switch # and puts into action column directly, reuses parts of blink on routine
;tested ok, but no net byte savings as it's just not used a lot in flight 2000 - reverted

;added skill shot, spots letter in blast off, if all completed, spots 5-4-3-2-1, if neither qualifies, +25k
;need to add 'neither' branch after determine if both locked and countdown over
;not making skill shot kills letter

;v18
;neither condition identified as 'all systems go' lamp in upper left (and 1st/2nd stage go, too)
;start multiball crashes after release first rocket, no letter countdown/no launch of next ball
;skill shot should happen at all ball launches, not just first shot?
;skill shot keeps collecting targets when it shouldn't

;v19
;narrowed issue with multiball down to something with the 'system' mods
;found error in binc routine, wasn't actually incrementing B, and the ONLY place this command is used is in the blast off sequence,
;which is where the error is. However, now the score just increases.
;also, 'b' and 'o' spot drops, and they shouldn't, when they are already collected

;v21
;error in checking tilt in score routine causes score $25 error in blast off countdown - fixed by reverting to stock asm
;rewrote skill shot to spot letters correctly, as well as preserving the switch row which fixes the incorrect spotting of drop banks
;skill shot now uses freed up memory from blink routines to track shots
;added knocker code, needs test
;'blast' still lighting after multiball start/ball to ball

;v22
;testing flag 5f if it is multiball active flag - it's only active while the maze walker/blast off countdown happens

;v23
;ball registers 208 and 209 on p3/p4 displays in bcd nibble hi/lo to determine what sets them and why

;208 in single player game stays at $0f
;209:
;all 3 in trough: $07
;2 trough, 1 shooter lane: $03
;1 lock, 1 trough, 1 shooter lane: $21 /$20=middle ball walker position
;2 lock, 0 trough, 1 shooter lane: $30 /$10=bottom ball walker position
; $31 SOMETIMES ($01, sticks)
;at multiball start, walks from $20 to $10 to $00 as balls empty
;lock during multiball, /$20=middle ball walker position

;v24 1.25.2020 party test

;notes:
; need to test right spinner for spinning already before enabling quickshot
; add no scoring to maze elements if you just got '1st/2nd stage go' lit (i.e. ball lock stealing)
; skill shot works, possibly explore option to add relight on locks.

;v25
;
;added test for spinner flag active and specifically block lighting the right spinner quick shot advance
;changed ball walker timing back to stock for multiball launch, as it was clearing the maze before BLAST OFF relit
;add $0032/80 for status flag, multiball active for 2x/3x scoring and ball walker re-entry
;add $0032/01 for status flag to inhibit 10k maze kickbig scoring if you didn't actually lock 2 balls yet and are rotating
; another player's balls out of the lock into the maze

;10k inhibit works TOO well.... always inhibits. <==BUG**
;startup ball walker doesn't work <==BUG**

;v26

;fixed startup ball walker.... 3 balls can be ejected from the maze kickbigs. added switch test between anyway
;delay functionality works on ball walker at startup
;inhibit 10k now works, had to test specifically for the bit after and'ing it - according to other stern code you shouldn't have to do this

;need to work on adding:

;need more code optimizations
;multiball blow through still doesn't work
;maze exit at multiball start, still too fast (it's back to stock!) to catch all blast off back on
;spinner counters
;2x/3x scoring during multiball
;drop resetting between balls

;v27

;multiball blowthrough working, need to test permutations of balls draining and add scoring to maze exits when active
;scoring was added hopefully it will work....

;maze scoring still not working, unload walker still too fast.

;v28
;unload walker crashes during multiball, removed multiball test for now

;uncommented org $198d to see if sound tables correctly relocated

;it didn't....apparently my entire code to change the sound table indexing was wrong because it certainly didn't work.

;v29

;tried new sound decoding, it finally seems to work
;shaved virtual direct action switches, 2/3 of them are never activated virtually, only directly, part of system2 directive

;$32 is accessible if you use $cf-$c8 for lamp number - you can manipulate the bits this way for multiball usage in pigs

;new flags: cf 32/80=multiball active
; cb 32/08=10k inhibit (set=don't award 10k in maze)
; 32/20-10=playfield multiplier displayed value if multiball active
; ca 32/08=flag to flip the blit
; c9 32/04=set-right spinner blitting
; 32/02-01=playfield multiplier to save in score routine if multiball active

;if multiball is set, score multiplier should work, and blit to ball in play

;v31

;got a TON of points when the left spinner was going and I relocked the ball in the walker, likely when the score was counting down.
;need sanity check on the points multiplier. ==>ADDED SANITY CHECK TO SCORE ROUTINE

;might need a TAD longer on the ball walker, 2 balls made it into the left kickbig on bootup ==>LEFT FOR NOW

;10k not awarded when you go into the kickbigs in multiball - there's probably an existing flag I can use for this although it wouldn't
;do the sound effect ==>ADDED FLAG CLEAR BEFORE MULTIBALL TEST INSTEAD OF AFTER, update, still n/w

;skill shot made did not get "o" <=could not duplicate

;v31A

;error in trimming speech - $00 is the speech stoppper, was getting "commence countdown 5" because of this, corrected

;still not scoring the 10k during multiball....

;v32 debug weebly only build semaphores show on p3/p4

;stop on left 1 (5b set) and right 3 (5a clear)

;v33 eliminate general playfield multiplier, added in 2x scoring while ball in ball walker during multiball
;03
;BUG: Skill shot doesn't always work correctly
;04
;BUG: Skill shot after multiball lights on locks, might still light on all locks on the "S" (which is weak on my PF)
;05 Fixed by adding a specific test and clear for $35, the contents of the skill shot. Clears after ball advance only.
;BUG: Now the skill shot is 'hidden' but will still payout.
;06 Fixed by changing $35, but it is still !0
;BUG: Lock a ball, get the skill shot again, puts status BACK to previous, incorrect.
;07 Fixed by changing order of lda $1b, sta $34, so that the 'new' status gets updated as well before checking if
; skill shot on lock should be activated or not
; U6 IS FULL!!!
;BUG: Still restoring the incorrect lamps....grrrr.....
;08 Changed the restore lamps to be the inverted left lane lamps instead of saved lamps
;STILL BUG: Didn't work as planned on ball locks.
;09 Changed to not reset the score flag on locks
;BUG: 10k bonus, still counts 1k extra
;11 Revamped bonus testing to eliminate the extra 1k (game assumes 1k is always lit)
;BUG: bonus works except when you have 19k, then only counts 10k portion
;12 bonus works
;13 add dip 18, reset 5 bank for countdown off=no, on=yes, reset to 5 on multiball
;BUG: doesn't reset properly
;14 added light 5 -need to crunch one byte out of u2 now
; no more on/off of 3 bank sweep - it's either on or off depending on drop bank status
;
;BUG: 5 bank drops the 5 when entering all systems go - shouldn't!
;BUG: No score tilt, tilt lamp never goes out
;15 fixed tilt lamp
; Need to change the way sweep lamp works
; 5 bank still not working
;16
; changed sweep lamp routine to check for attract mode active, and timer active for you got a sweep.
; changed 5 bank reset location, added flag 47 in there which resets it

;17 changed bonus countdown routine to do the 'full' 19k
; changed bonus countdown sound script to not scale out of range
; standup wow pays extra ball instead of special, set by dip 23

;18 added dip 13 to skill shot award to award both 'F' if 13 on
; added clearing of blink register in score routine to catch skill shots that blink/continue to blink when they shouldn't
; added a timer factor to the LAST lanes to reduce the incidences of the standup B targets activating the quick shot
;BUG: blink register clear completely broken, cannot put in the score routine
;19
; spot both F works (need to test SINGLE F spot)
; timer factor for skill shot is likely ok, need to add some visual indication of this for testing

;need to add some more skill shot blockers (Pops, mainly)

;21 add to quick shot cancel routine, the timeout on timer $63 (as set from top rollovers)

;Need to adjust prevent timer for quickshot/add cancel prevent to slings, O, F, drops
;left lane spinner sometimes doesn't count spins
;If "F" is the last letter you need for commence countdown, it should drop the spotted drop first, not reset to 5 then drop the 5

That design is so much better than either of the earlier 2 - the ball STOPS in the cutout at the bottom, game waits to gently lob it into that trough, which due to the switch design, can't have any ball go backwards up it due to the hook (well, maybe the leftmost one, but who cares, there's no more switches there for the game to reactive and get confused.

In fact, I might go so far as to say this is the best designed early multiball trough - if they had this on nine ball I bet the issues would have been a lot less. I wonder if Joe Joos Jr. designed it I think he was the mechanical engineer at Stern for a long time in addition to designing some games.

So the current tally of free bytes in v33.24 is 12/26 (low rom area/high rom area). That's crazy considering what I started with. Just the other day I cut down this routine for the attract mode, which is just copying 8 bytes from a data table to the lamps.

if system2=0
;attract mode lamp data
L145F:; 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20
db $00,$00,$00,$00,$87,$0e,$c0,$03
db $10,$ac,$c4,$ff,$40,$80,$c2,$00
db $ab,$d5,$23,$ff,$27,$ee,$20,$00
db $44,$7e,$94,$ff,$10,$f0,$12,$00
db $00,$80,$08,$00,$0f,$80,$00,$03
db $00,$00,$00,$00,$87,$0e,$c0,$03
else
;attract mode lamp data
L145F:; 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f
db $00,$00,$00,$00,$87,$0e,$c0
db $10,$ac,$c4,$ff,$40,$80,$c2
db $ab,$d5,$23,$ff,$27,$ee,$20
db $44,$7e,$94,$ff,$10,$f0,$12
db $00,$80,$08,$00,$0f,$80,$00
db $00,$00,$00,$00,$87,$0e,$c0
endif ;system2

Notice that in the second set of data, I eliminated the last byte because it's only ever 3 or 0. This equates to the outlane special lamps being on or off.... probably not so important for attract mode. This saves 6 bytes overall. But.... could there still be a way to alternate the specials at the right time? See the first column for the $19 data, it's $00 when the specials are supposed to be on, so is there anywhere else in the code I can turn on the special lamps?

Turns out there is - the outlane special lamps also alternate in game, so there's some code there to this already:
alt_outlane_special: ;for the attract mode
altlampbvalueon $38 ;right outlane special
altlampbvalueon $39 ;left outlane special
return ;return

Ignore that the macro is named 'altlampbvalueON' - it's just alternating the lamp, turning it on if its off, and off if its on. Back in the attract mode code, this is the routine that copies the data down:

lda $08,x ;1st element lamps 0-7
sta $0019 ;save
ldb $09,x ;2nd element lamps 8-f
stb $001A ;save
lda $0A,x ;3rd element lamps 10-17
sta $001B ;save
lda $0B,x ;4th element lamps 18-1f
sta $001C ;save
lda $0C,x ;5th element lamps 20-27
sta $001D ;save
lda $0D,x ;6th element lamps 28-2f
sta $001E ;save
lda $0E,x ;7th element lamps 30-37
ldb $001F ;get current lamps 30-37
andb #$0D ;preserve game over, tilt, and hstd lamps
aba ;combine with the 7th element lamps
sta $001F ;save
lda $0F,x ;8th element lamps 38-3b
ldb $0020 ;get current lamps 38-3b
andb #$FC ;clear outlane specials
aba ;combine with the 8th element lamps
sta $0020 ;save

Simple copy down, right? Look at the code for the 8th element - that's the one we eliminated the data from. (Starting at lda $f,x). That's 9 bytes right there concerning that element. Since we already know that $19's data is $00 when the specials are on, and that the specials by default are off when the attract mode starts (because earlier in the code, all of the 6810 ram $00-$7f is cleared at bootup) - here is the code that replaced it for the same functionality:

lda $07,x ;1st element lamps 0-7
sta $0019 ;save
bne no_alt_spec
swi
gosub alt_outlane_special
no_alt_spec:
ldb $08,x ;2nd element lamps 8-f

So when the incoming data for $19 is non-zero, swap the outlane specials. Yes, the very first step of the attract mode SHOULD have the specials lit, and it doesn't.... but it functions correctly after that. The thing that is nice about the PIGS gosub function is that for the subroutine referenced, it automatically sets the multiprocessing flag (normally, you'd have to do a SWI, RCFLAGSET, command, ILA sequence, for 2 additional bytes). Gosub is the only command that acts this way, and it's very convenient in this case.

There is an "edge case" possibility in the way the attract mode works, in that at the end of the game, if you drain your last ball WITH one of the outlane specials lit, this will affect the way the specials display in the attract mode, since one will be alternating at the wrong time. Small price to pay for the byte savings, though. (Earlier games have WAY messed up attract modes at game over, Meteor's is positively sickening, but most people have never noticed this - wrong lamps on/off depending on what you finished the game with. They never specifically CLEAR the lamp data before starting the attract mode. This was fixed in one of my previous projects concerning meteor).

And, of course, sharp eyed coders will have noticed that the $19 element is now offset *7* instead of *8* - because we've cut down the # of elements that get copied down from 8, to 7.

So, the total bytes saved from this small change are the 6 bytes out of the table, no bytes for the special alternate routine since it's already existing in another routine, and 3 bytes in the copy down routine for a total of 9 overall bytes saved.... not much, but every byte counts here (recall that there were *5* bytes free in the entire unmodified codebase.... and I just doubled it with this small change).

If I just left out the outlane specials alternating code altogether, that's another potential 6 bytes of savings for very little behavior change. If I need some bytes back later on I might very well come back to this and do it. But, since the code is feature complete at this point, it's only going to be tweaks and bug fixes from now on.

I'll be posting various other ways I saved space in the code, most of which have already been rolled into Nine Ball, and will be used as well in the Bobby Orr Power Pigs original coding.

The current revision v33.25 is up. Changed the quickshot standup to not light on the top B's (although it is still possible to do so.... unavoidable because all the B's in the game are the same switch). Also tweaked the cooling off period for not lighting the quick shot (switches at the top of the playfield start a timer to prevent the B switches from lighting the quickshot)
Barring gross errors or any other ideas for features, I'm calling this done. The only things I'd probably want to add is a way to indicate the quickshot availability on the right spinner (via an animated style arrow with blinking lamps) but there's no room in the rom for this, and possibly adding the left spinner lane to the quickshot, but I don't think that's necessary. Maybe the animated arrow will appear in the 512 image/weebly only board version, if I decide to go ahead with that.

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

Here's more examples of taking advantage of the way the 6800 sets flags on certain operations to save some space:

Original code:

addb #$10
cmpb #$80
bne L5349

New code:
addb #$10
bpl L5349

So, saved 2 bytes here. There's lot of places in the code where things like this save a byte here, a byte there.

So of course, because I have about 28 bytes free, I'm meddling again.

Added attract mode speech, dip 17, repurposed, on=attract speech off=no attract speech (speech is always enabled in game regardless of this dip position)
Every approximately 6-7 minutes, the game will attempt to have people put quarters into it by saying "ALL SYSTEMS GO, COMMENCE COUNTDOWN". (I wish I'd had space to slice and dice all the vocals to ones that the game doesn't necessarily use, but there isn't space).

I'm also toying with the idea of returning the playfield multiplier to a possible 3x, and playing with the timing of how long the PF multiplier lasts - currently, in multiball, if you get a ball up into the walker, it starts 2x scoring for a short period which equates to about the time it takes the ball to walk out of the walker area and get back into play near the pop bumpers.

Once, during playtesting, I managed to get a second ball up there as well (this is not easy!) while the 2x was running, so I think it would be neat to re-enable the 3x scoring (the code for this is commented out) - you're not going to have playfield multipliers active for long in any case (although of course getting it lit to 3x would re-enable the full time.... and I guess if you KEPT shooting the ball up there you COULD do this.....)

Even with all the changes and about 200 games under my belt with the 3325 level of code, I still only get multiball once every 10 games or so, and the top score is a couple over 3 million, with most still in the 400-900k range. The BLAST standup quickshot isn't easy to hit but satisfying when you do, and I REALLY like the ability to set the dips to collect an extra ball on it and still get a special on the outlanes (thanks to whoever made that suggestion). Gives you an incentive to shoot that target.

I'll have to see if I can swing this playfield multiplier thing, as the attract mode speech left me with only 2 bytes free (to get the timing correct.... the first run through was speech every 42 minutes or so... too long. The 2nd attempt was 12 minute intervals, still a little slow, and the third is OK at 6 minutes I think. It's one byte extra for 6 minutes vs. 12, and I did find a redundant 2 bytes in the multiball routine - so 4 bytes free for the 2x-3x thing.... ugh....)

Latest revision 3326 is not up on the allentown pinball site yet, until I shoehorn the extra scoring in.

Yes works on mpu 200. Use 716 or 732 depending on how your board is jumpered.

There a lot of versions of the Weebly board when it was being developed - hopefully barakandl will see this and jump in with what the sockets and jumpers were like then.

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

version 3327 is posted. The last thing I might want to monkey with is the 2x/3x timer - it's pretty short. The intent is that you would have a ball on the left flipper, one on the right, nail the walker shot with the right, then when 2x starts, nail the right spinner for more score.

I'm already at the limit for the timer on this (it's an 8 bit timer....) so I'll have to come up with another timer/memory location to count this down, or maybe reset it as the ball hits each of the kickbigs in the maze.

Dip 17 now controls attract mode speech on/off.

Playfield multiplier during multiball only - walker starts 2x. If you put another in there before the 2x expires, you get a period of 3x, then more 2x. It's a pretty short period which is why I'm going to play with the timing on it.

The walker unloads during multiball unlike stock - which is actually the main reason I tackled this project in the first place. Invariably, I'd get multiball on the game and then the balls would end up back in the walker, ending the multiball. Lots of work for little results.

It would be nice to get 12k/spin on the left spinner - that's some crazy points.

I also found yesterday that the Apollo 1/2 and blast off lights for 10k/20k/30k will score ALL of the lit lights instead of the highest one. I'm not sure what the original intention was, but the inclination would be to change it to that, because once you have the 40k lit, you were actually getting more for the 5-4-3-2-1 sequence (70k). Although, the 40k BLASTOFF completion lights the specials, if you have those set to 100k, that's more right there.

If I reset the timer at each of the kickbigs it should be ok. I was just evaluating how many bytes I have free and it's tight. There is a free timer, somehow, so I might be able to tie into that.

The problem is that each thread doesn't have a consistent set of memory like a williams game does - it's a shared pool, so I'd need some way to reset the state or find a free byte of ram somewhere.... I'm also going to explore if I can slow down the timers, they're already pretty fast, but that would mean changing all the existing things in the game that are on timers to be 1/2 or the attract mode won't work correctly.

I've been able to capitalize on the 2x playfield in my 220 games or so of testing only once.

So I got lucky in that the timer I need to lengthen is at the end of a series of 8, so I just changed that one timer to only decrement when the match also happens to be 00. (So slower by 90% than normal). Just tweaking the amount of time that the playfield multiplier stays active at this point; I might have the initial multiball start give the 2x scoring as the last ball exits the maze..... if I can find space. Down to almost nothing again.

This is some of what I've been having to do to shave bytes:

Original code:
ifcleargoto L12C6 ;set to 3 balls per game, branch to score 1000
score $21 ;score 100
return ;return
L12C6:
score $31 ;score 1000
return ;return

New code:
ifsetgoto dip7setto5
score $29 ;score 900 for 3 balls/game...
dip7setto5:
score $21 ;score 100 more for 3, and only 100 for 5
return ;this shaves a byte

The Original code is 9 bytes.... the new code is 8 bytes. 1 byte shavings! Now, go through ALL the code in the game to do the same types of things. 8k of code is challenging.

3328 is posted at the usual place, this I think is SLIGHTLY too long on the playfield multiplier, and the clear score queue quickly function didn't work on the drain (so you get all your earned points during the multiplier).

I wish Stern would have made the ball walker solenoid one of the continuous ones, then there wouldn't be contention with other solenoids. IIRC both the kickbigs in the maze are continuous solenoids used as momentaries - which of course is more coding, but it works well. I don't really want to start rewiring solenoids and switches though, because then the software is no longer plug and play.

3329 is up, fixed the issue with score queues in the outhole (they will count down really fast, as well when you go into the walker during multiball) - that way you don't get ripped off from multiplied queue scores you put there.

Tweaked the multiplier time I think it's better now.

I re-read the entire thread last night and a lot of the suggestions made it in, a couple of the timed things, and I would like to add in the speech once you complete the countdown "go for mission" or maybe "GO - GO -GO" - let's see how many more bytes I can squeeze out of this.

Sort of related, an old version of Flight 2000 is the one I tested an 'instant boot' type of thing with, I was thinking that a way to do this and still preserve the self-test if desired would be to do fast boot by default, but if you hold down the S33 button on the MPU board it would do the normal, full bootup. I know I'll have to get used to the fast boot but I'm sure I can do that.

Someone a long time ago asked me to put in a bootup similar to Bally into Williams games, but there was no room there to do so.

You shouldn't need to do anything other than the normal go through each adjustment and audit and zero it that you should do when moving mpu200 from any game to any other.
So I guess that's a yes on clearing....

EDIT: If you meant flight 2000 stock code to the new version, no addresses were changed in the nvram, so no clearing needed. I went out of my way with the crunchdown techniques to preserve all the original functionality of the audits/adjustments.... if I could have changed the coin handling, for instance, that's a lot of bytes I could have used easily. Could have just ripped that out and made it 1/1, 2/1, 3/1, and 4/1 fixed ratios and only needed 2 dips to do that.

Latest tweaks are up, some vocal stingers added, tweaked the 3x/2x timing, somehow saved some more space.

v33.32

I was hoping that the final last version will be 33.33 for symmetry so anything else I do better fit and work bug free in the next subrevision

https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/galaxy-asm/flight2k-mod33.zip?attredirects=0&d=1

It's not just a dip switch other things have to be changed as well because of the differing playfield layout. (Skill shot, possibly quickshot) I have not looked too far into that stuff yet.

Can a gammatron owner go into switch test and test all the 'letter' switches and let me know what switch # they are? I think they did some rewiring when they made the PF vs. Flight's and I want to make sure I change the skill shot and quick shot stuff correctly. Also, since gammatron has that extra entrance to the maze from the pop I'll have to make sure that scores all the time, not just after 2 locks.

For instance, flight's switches are:
B 24
L 23
A 22
S 21
T 20
O 19
F (right) 18
F(left) 17

So gammatron:
G ?
A ?
M ?
A ?
T ?
R ?
O ?
N ?
Once I have that information I can add the gammatron changes and some lucky gamatron owner will get to alpha/beta test it!

I moved the switch and solenoids numbers to the next 2 digits over (easiest to code that way it's just a couple rearrangements and one byte change).

That was a dumb thing they did to reuse the same software like that unmodified - IIRC you shift the wires over on the 6 digit displays to make gamatron work on the 6 digit displays, loosing the 'real' 1's digit.

Sent Andrew the test version so I can adjust the skill shot stuff.

What version is this? Shows in match at boot up.

The ball Walker cycles three times at boot up to clear any balls in the lock.

There shouldn't be anything that scores that high but it depends on what version you burned.

I thought about doing this back when I was putting the skill shot in, but I think it's "too much skill shot" if that makes sense. I've definitely gone "too far" in the past with game mods (Night Rider is CLOSE to being too far, but it's still the essence of the game.... Trident was definitely too far/too many changes. I'm aiming for the spirit of the original game with small tweaks.)

You definitely shouldn't be getting 6 millions for a skill shot - which set of roms are you using, the 716, the 732, or the 512 on a weebly board?

The skill shot is supposed to spot a letter if you need one, spot a 5-4-3-2-1 drop if not, and score 25k if neither makes sense. (i.e. you have all the drops already, and blast off is already spelled)

At bootup, all the displays should show all zeroes and the ball walker should step 3 times - then the maze switches will clear the balls out on their own. You're supposed to wait for the balls to hit the drain - stock code waits for balls to hit the trough switches, but it only runs 7 times - if the balls aren't there after 7 cycles, it lets you start a game there as well. There is rudimentary ball search code built into the stock game - if a ball hits the walker entry or the maze switches, they will clear.

What happens if you miss the skill shot does it play normally?

Do other things work properly? i.e. bonus ladder 19k, quickshot off B/O to right spinner and blast standup, etc.?

I plan on popping an mpu200 in there later today to see what happens with that because all my development takes place in the 512 socket on the weebly board - there "shouldn't" be any difference between the boards, but I will double check it to make sure. (I'm not using the extra capabilities of the weebly board in this instance)

OK, slapped an mpu200 in there (not sure if it was my original f2k board or not) and burned the 2732's from the zip file right off the website - it's version 3333 up there (3335 is in alpha/beta test on my weebly board, no gameplay changes, just changes for the gamatron folks, and multiple switch closure test - also testing the insta-bootup which I'm still not sure if I like it or not (you press the s33 button to get the 'normal' bootup in the first couple seconds, if you want the diagnostics, but otherwise, it's power up-2 seconds-booted. That version of the software doesn't fit currently in the stock footprint, but I might be able to make it)

There's currently 6 bytes in the low rom area, and zero in the upper rom area without the quickboot in there.

I would double check that the eproms burned correctly - the 716 images I just double checked against the 2732's in the file and they are fine as well.

The software both stock and mine don't make any assumptions about nvram data being 'correct' - they specifically reinitialize anything that needs to be on bootup and game start. The clock speed is definitely different between my mpu200 and the weebly, the weebly is slightly quicker, but it worked on both.

I've sent off the test gamatron 35 build to barakandl as well for testing. I'm crossing my fingers that it's not too 'broken' - gamatron manages to rearrange a lot of the switches that I was using for the skill shot as well as the quickshot functions.

That is very bizarre, because both pops run the same exact code for the scoring sequences - the top pop should do the craziness as well. (The actual firing of the pops and slings is in the background routines, not in the scoring routines).

Do you have the ball trough that kicks the balls backwards as it launches (looks like this pic: https://ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=887&picno=49151)? That is the type I have in mine as well, and the game will launch an extra ball if there is more than one ball in the trough AND it kicks it back far enough to slowly go over the leftmost switch again. It's probably why stern changed the design mid run to a different mechanism. While this can likely be addressed in software, this type of switch slowing response takes a lot of romspace (relatively) - I'm going to be investigating to see if something physical can be done to address the kickback. I get it about once every 50-60 balls or so, regardless of the version of the software in there.

The ball walker shouldn't be faster than stock - I'll double check it later on. Make sure there isn't a divot on the entrance to the ball walker, my old PF had that as well and it didn't matter how long the pulse was, it hung up there. I added a small nail to the PF on that one to hold the ball slightly off the divot. It's an artifact of well-used f2k playfields to get that divot, I'm sure the new CPR one I have in there will develop it as well. (If there was a way to slow the ball down as it rockets up there, that would help.... or maybe a cliffy can go in there but that maze area is so tight I'm not sure. Gamatron actually does that mech much better with the discrete kickout holes).

My ball walker fingers that stick up through the playfield were hammered as well, I ended up using the same mech off a scrap freefall playfield I had.

Can you double check the 2716's against the downloaded file again? Do you normally double or triple burn your eproms? I've found with 2716's that sometimes they need a little extra <something> to get them to reliably burn (ditto with 2732's on my minipros, I always at least double burn them).

Played several games on 3335, which is now posted at the normal link.

Only difference is that in the switch test, it will show all the closed switches, flash the 0, then show them again (not just the lowest numbered switch as normal).

This should help find switch wiring errors or if you have multiple switches out.

One thing that needs to be addressed is that while the ball walker is walking during multiball, no other switches are reacting - I'll have to have a deep think on how to fix that, because solenoid scripts normally can't be interrupted. Since the ball walker is an exceptionally long timer period, I think it will have to be some kind of re-entrant timed routine (luckily, I have at least one timer left.... I'm just short on romspace! 6 bytes right now in low rom and 0 in high rom....)

I didn't think too much of it previously in playtesting (over 600 games now....) because I was holding the balls on the flippers and aiming for the walker to get the 2x/3x. I happened to hit it spontaneously a couple times and it was pop bumper.... thud. (you can't make the pops or slings activate while the walker is walking since the walker is a momentary one - they should have made it a continuous one instead. This is a hardware limitation of the solenoid driver circuitry, not a software limitation.)

The correct thing to do is create a solenoid queuing system, but rom and ramspace is scarce for that kind of thing, or to rewire the ball walker, but hardware mods past the knocker I'm declaring out of the scope of this build.

Updated instruction card for 3 ball game. I'll be working on the manual as well to update the various things like schematics, adjustments, etc. I had a full color cover for this as well way back but the file didn't load correctly so I might have to recreate this (it took a lot of work to get the picture at the 'correct' aspect ratio... this was ten years ago or so though so hopefully easier to duplicate today.)

I'm really thinking about the idea of changing the ball walker to a dedicated solenoid setup activated by a small helper board so it can fire while other solenoids are going. It would still use the same solenoid driver, just connected to a pop bumper driver board (from a gottlieb system 80) modified to have a much longer 'on' pulse. This would let the pulse still happen just with a much shorter period so other solenoids can fire.

This would have to be dip switch settable for people that don't have the extra board.

FLIGHT2000-New-INSTRUCTIONS-FLAT.png

Go into audits adjustment 4 and push S33 or the clear button on the coin door to reset it to 0. Then press credit button to advance it or you'll run into an artifact of crunching the code down for size - any hstd less than 100k will show leading zeroes.

I'll have to do some research on how long I need the PBDB to fire the solenoid. Probably best to put a pot on it instead of just discrete resistors while I'm tuning it; worse than a pop or sling not firing would be a ball that gets its status lost because of the ball walker pulse being too short, although I think you have to adjust the cap as well as the resistor for the timing pulses. I'd really like to put some kind of switches there instead of doing it in software, but that would be a custom job as well.

I'll have to see where I can wrangle out a free dip switch too, to even adjust the software end of the timing.

So after watching dri 's stream last night, I'm inclined towards the 2x/3x just not being worth it - if I make the scoring longer, possibly, but it's almost like the score multiplier on flash gordon - lots of work to get it and you don't really have anything planned to do with it once you do, unless you can nail the 15x collect.

I'll be experimenting with hardware for the ball walker pulse for a while now - roughed the code in using dip 14 (formerly background sound on/off).

I spotted a bug that I'll be reviewing from the stream, and I spotted a bug in the code that I thought was eliminating the background sound but was actually some other function in the sound code. I need 4 bytes back to fix that one.... lowrom is 100% full.

I do also want to add a visual cue for the right spinner quickshot - won't have enough space to make an animation, but I can certainly make the existing lamps blink during that time.

It can, but that's going to go outside the scope of what I want to do with the mod. In my experience, 10% or less of people interested in a rom mod actually try it out. Add some kind of required hardware change to that mix and it's going to drop to 1%.

use a 27256:
http://www.pinball4you.ch/okaegi/pro_softnine.html

and here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20170412040716/http://warpzonearcade.com/?p=402

Lot of messy wiring.

This one is easier:
https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/romblaster

Daughter board to plug into the 6800 socket.

I could just use the extra ram/rom on the weebly board directly (it's kind of why its there) - but that's raising the bar even higher for adoption.

Also, I find that I'm enjoying the challenge of rewriting the original code for space efficiency.

No.... doesn't really need it. I might not drop the 2x/3x but I need to rethink how it works. It's really hard to take advantage of currently (especially the 3x) - maybe I'll change it to get one ball up there, then the second and it recounts down the blast off letters (or whatever you have lit at the time). That kind of smacks of a "mission" though, which I also don't care for.

Any chance for a dip option to drain all balls in the walker before the start of each new game? My thought is that it would drain all balls in the walker after ball 3 of the last player.

There's no need to do that unless you have the dip set to carry over locks. The game handles locks properly and the only difference would be you get to shoot the ball from the shooter lane instead of it launching from the maze. It could be done but then there has to be code to check the outhole before allowing a game to start, which can be confusing on location games where a ball is stuck somewhere.

I happen to be a software dev and have a small technical background in embedded systems as well as assembly language. I would love to know more on how to get started on such a path as writing my own ROMs - any direction you could send would be greatly appreciated!
* What software do you use to write, compile, and debug your code?
* What assembly language is used? (I have experience with MIPS and ARM)
I see the ROMs are available to download. Is your assembly source code available for download as well?

pinmame debug, a relatively old version. AS02 to assemble. Stern pigs is a mix of 6800 assembly and an interpreted language they called PIGS.... look at my other posts for the Galaxy disassembly thread to see it up close and personal. There's a beginning of a guide at:
https://sites.google.com/site/allentownpinball/pigsprogramming but not really complete.

The original flight 2000 commented code I built off of is on that site as well but not the changes - development tree is extremely messy right now because I've taken to adding/removing code now by 'sections' as I add/test, eventually I'll have it there once I'm "done" with the changes.

Of course, anything I decline to add you can add yourself once the code is posted

Working on cutting more space into the roms - was able to combine some like routines, and found a couple of never-used pigs routines that were cut as well. I have a couple of ideas on cutting even more into the code to save some space - it will be hellish for future generations who might decide to reverse engineer it so hopefully the source code will come with it (the 512 images when finalized will start to include a 7zipped copy of the source code in the normally empty space).

Now there's 11 bytes in the low rom area and 84 in the upper to add some kind of quickshot indication for the right spinner - the first test of this was a complete failure as it's pretty dangerous to blink something without knowing its original status first..... random results ensue if you don't save it first.

Testing just the cut down before adding anything back. No other additions were cut yet but I still need to think long about the 2x/3x thing. Maybe it makes more sense to award the 3x and have it decay - then if you want it to stay at 3x, keep shooting it back up.

Maybe it makes more sense to give the 2x/3x scoring JUST for the spinners? They really are the thing I'd shoot for anyway (unless 5-4-3-2-1 is right at the 1). Doing so would streamline the code a lot because then there's no 2x/3x generic code taking up space - and handling queued scoring with the multiplier is sloppy at best.

I have it set to pay an extra ball for the wow. If you had a full left spinner rip for 12k/spin you could easily get 300k.

Also could be possible to change the 2x/3x lighting to completing BLAST (for 2x) and OFF (for 3x) during multiball, and NOT timing it out. Or spelling BLASTOFF for 2x, again for 3x although that just becomes really difficult after a while. The multiplier could either be only multiball (if it were easier to get) or harder (if it stays into the single ball portion).

Or maybe I just need to tweak the 2x/3x timers again - I've had it "too long" and "too short" - it still seems too short at this point. The issue with tying it to the walker is that when the walker is walking, there's really nothing else the machine can react to properly. Gotta get that pop bumper driver board in there, or maybe repurpose the continuous solenoid I'm using for the knocker to the walker instead (continuous as momentary are separate timing circuits).... that's probably better than adding a piece of hardware.

So it sounds like you should stick with the original romset?

No, too much like Black Knight, Fathom, etc. - I still like the idea of the walker triggering it I just need to tweak the timing on it. Have to experiment with the pop bumper driver board - I realized it can be mounted in the head (for easy access to +5v). The walker moving really kills the response on the machine, so something has to happen there. I'm concerned that in the future someone that gets the rom without the instructions will be like WTF is this, wrong solenoids firing, etc. I think I'm going to work on adding something in the audits/adjustments that you have to set to use whatever the walker ends up being, that way someone probably won't set it by mistake (like adding adjustment 18/19, both have to be set to 66 for the alternate walker code to operate).

From the stream as well I'm going to work on the 2 5 bank blinking lights, I've had it happen on my machine as well where 2 blink lamps light in error, so there needs to be a test for that. It's probably something where the interrupt happens to update the blinking lamp while the game is expecting it in a different state so have to block the interrupt first before updating it - usually stern games do this, but maybe this routine doesn't.

I have never seen the error occur on the stock roms so clearly it's from something I've added. I wish the code I decided to crunch first in this latest go-round had worked, because it got me over 130 bytes back.... but it was a complete failure (coining up or starting a game just crashed the entire game..... I single stepped the code in pinmame to try and determine even where it was crashing, but was unsuccessful. I may revisit this if I run out of space again though.)

I'm also going to work on testing where the balls are before you start the game - especially with the new delay walker code at bootup, you can start a game with balls sitting in the wrong places. I still say that kind of thing is on the player, and it's only going to happen once per boot anyway.

I'm going to experiment with some transplanted sound effects also see if I can get any working.... never been able to do that previously though, but I know more about the sound engine(s) now - they're slightly different in every game.

No, that's his machine - notice it only happened when he was shaking it. So something was activating the walker switch that shouldn't have - he was also getting a 25k score off the center standup at the start of each ball.

There's been so much discussion of the ball walker code among the beta testers - it's the stock code! The timing is not different, it walks at the same speed. I tried to make it shorter but it never worked out.

What sounds, specifically, would be a good lift from those games into flight? The sound I always try and poach is the 25k sound from Big Game - I love that mmmmvvoooott sound.

The walking works, it's just that during it hitting pops or slings - thud. No available solenoid driver to handle this. I wish they'd made the walker a continuous one instead of a momentary. I'll be playing around with the swap of the knocker (which is on a continuous one right now) to a momentary, and using that continuous one (for which you can assign a separate timer) to the walker.

You should quote the section you're referring to - issues on that game on the stream when the switch activates when it shouldn't due to a hardware issue, or the issues where the pops/slings don't work while it's walking, which all stern games do when a momentary solenoid fires for a long time. It's one of the deficiencies in 9 Ball as well, if the top 3 banks are resetting, it's very possible to hit the pop bumper and get..... nothing. (you get the score, but no pop). Trident suffers from this as well, because the standups are treated like a drop bank when they are complete, there's an delay when they reset and they use the solenoid timer IIRC so the pop doesn't fire. (Also sometimes with the memory drops)

It's really pronounced on flight 2000 because the walker coil has to pulse for a very long period or the balls don't have enough time to walk down.

I plan on swapping the knocker coil circuit for the walker circuit; however, this is going to "break" the software on people's machines who don't realize this needs to happen. (I.e. they got the rom with no documentation, or they got a machine that had it in and in the course of checking out the machine they switch the wires back without realizing)

Too bad you can't pulse the walker to shoot the ball backwards, this happens sometimes 'naturally' but with no where near enough strength to eject it 'backwards' - that would be fun.

Yes, that is what I'm working on by changing the continuous solenoid to act as a momentary, because it can be active while other solenoids are active. That's going into the machine to test now.

But where would you use these sounds? Flight 2000 overuses the "kapow" sound for sure (due to space no doubt in the original code).

Maybe during multiball the sounds change? I'll have to see how much space the sounds take up - with the swap of the walker solenoid there's going to be significantly less space, again. I don't think there's anything wrong with most of the f2k sounds as they are. I was intending the big game sound for the sweep award.

EDIT:

Just checked, back to 2 bytes free in upper rom, and about 14 in lower rom - so no space. The sounds take up a relatively large amount of space.

That's not to say that a special edition weebly board couldn't be used for its extra capabilities for a special edition of the modified software.